Hey y’all! So, as I’ve kind of been hinting at in various places and to variable degrees of coyness, I am going to be trying to make content creation work on a full-time basis. This is of course in addition to and on top of trying to do good criticism, journalism and commentary whenever possible through this site and various freelance gigs that may pop up for me. But I plan on streaming and making YouTube videos as part of the overall No Escape content strategy, as it were, and that means I am asking explicitly for your support.
I understand the risks of what I’m asking, and nobody is more nervous or expectant of failure in this regard than I am. But I’ve spent two months oscillating between panic and depression and a weirdly overly-cheerful kind of possibly-delusional resolve, and I believe fully that not only is this the right time to do this – in spite of every warning and indicator to the contrary – but it’s also the only time I will have this opportunity to make a clean break with the person I was even up to two months ago.
What We’ll Be Doing
I just got done with a nine-hour Saturday stream over on Twitch, wherein I experimented with both form and content, and I was able to nail down a format that allows us to go for a long time without being too harsh on the body. The all-day Unemployment Day Subathon is going to start at 9:00 AM CDT and last for as long as I can physically swing it, but within this challenge I will be breaking things up into manageable one-to-two-hour segments. Every two hours, I take a break; after four hours, I’ll take an hour-long “lunch” break. If we manage to make it to eight hours and decide to keep going, I’ll end up taking a second hour-long “dinner” break, and if we make it 12 hours or longer we’ll consider that to be Fourthmeal or something. These breaks will still be streamed, and the longer ones will catch me making food and having chats with y’all.
As far as what we’ll be doing during this time? Playing a variety of games, talking critically about them and generally just having a good time! With any luck we’ll be able to have some guests join us, and maybe we’ll even get to do a couple of interviews. Exact details are still needing to be nailed down, but trust me: we have plenty of options. We got so many options.
What Are Our Goals?
I’m calling it the Unemployment Day 500: Like a major NASCAR race or the Indianapolis 500, this Subathon is running with the goal of getting to 500 subscribers in one (or all) of three possible places: Twitch, YouTube or Patreon. There is a real logic to this number based on the way these platforms operate. For Twitch, there’s a 50/50 revenue split between myself and Twitch/Amazon. meaning for every $2.50 they get, I get $2.50 as well. Assuming that each subscription costs $5, then 500 subscribers would help me earn $1250 a month. This is guaranteed revenue, by the way. The payout threshold for Twitch is only about $50 and they pay on the 15th of each month, so 500 subscribers there would essentially replace half of the income I was making at my job.
For YouTube, it’s very different. 500 subscribers is one of the minimum thresholds for channel monetization. Once there, I also have to show 3,000 hours of watch time in a 365-day time frame, and upload at least three videos in the last 90 days (which I’ve overperformed on tbh). There is no monetary cost for anyone to subscribe to my YouTube channel, but the more people who do will get my videos in their feeds (maybe) and the more eyes means the faster I can collect the $.62 Google owes me.
Finally, there’s Patreon, and of the three I think Patreon is the simplest. I charge between $3 and $7 for Patreon supporters, but $3 is going to get you the wide bulk of everything my Patreon has to offer, including posts I didn’t put on No Escape, free copies of the zines I make, and it’s the only place (as of now) where you can catch the unedited VODs of my Twitch channel. I pay Patreon about eight percent of what I make and then I collect the rest of my payouts, so at the lowest-possible end, 500 paid subscribers on Patreon would equate to about $1500 a month, and since I get access to that pretty close to the first of the month, it works well as a balance with Twitch’s payout on the 15th. At the highest end it’s $3500 per month. Which would officially be more than I was making at my job. This would be fuckin bananas, but that leads me to the next thing.
Why Now?
My last day of official employment with the company I worked at for 11 years is August 28th. Our final paycheck will show up, as it has every two weeks for the last decade, a week later. On top of that I am getting four weeks’ severance in a lump sum. I’ll be living off that for as long as humanly possible. In short, I’m not so far gone down the rabbit hole of content creator stardom delusions that I’m hinging everything on this stream; if the subathon doesn’t go according to plan, or even if it just falls pretty far short of expectations, I won’t be out of runway. I’ll be able to go back to looking for work, the same as I have been for 60 straight days at this point, and that’ll be the end of the grand experiment. No harm, no foul; I won’t be ruining anything or myself over this.
(Would I be bummed? Sure. But I am as aware as anyone that right now fucking sucks for a lot of people.)
Here’s where I’m currently at, numbers-wise.
Patreon: 36 paid; 51 free
Twitch: 4 subscribers; 100 followers
YouTube: 49 subscribers
Honestly, even right now, I don’t think I’m doing too bad. For someone who just started doing this shit less than a month ago I’m actually feeling really good about these stats. But I know these are rookie numbers and we gotta pump ’em up. So if you’d like to come hang out at the Unemployment Day 500 with us, it’s gonna start at 9:00 AM CDT on August 30, 2026 on our Twitch channel. We’d love to have you there, we’d love to get your support, and we won’t let you down. This is No Escape‘s opportunity to do even better work, and it’s my opportunity to do the work I know I’m good at. I appreciate you taking the time to read this, and we’ll see you around next week!
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